A comprehensive collection of links to Dr. Michael Parenti's materials that are online--all videos, interviews, recorded lectures and other things are all recorded on this blog. In addition, Dr. Parenti will himself be writing and adding to his blog frequently. Visitors and members of this site are requested to refrain from using his material without proper attribution to the author. Thank you for your consideration!
Please also see http://michaelparenti.org/ for more of his articles online.

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Monday, 30 September 2013

Here is a new article I just finished writing. Feel free to post or share, giving due and proper attribution to the author.

Syria, Sarin, and Casus Belli by Michael Parenti

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that on August 21 the
Assad government slaughtered 1,429 people, including 426 children, in a
sarin chemical attack in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb. (Doctors Without
Borders put the total at about 300.)
Secretary Kerry insisted that now the United States had no choice but to
launch U.S. bombing attacks against President Bashar al-Assad,
devolving into another of America's "humanitarian wars."

The Sarin Mysteries
Following Kerry, President Obama announced that the situation in Syria
had changed irredeemably since August 21. The United States would have
to attack. But, on second thought, Obama decided to leave the decision
up to (a seemingly reluctant) Congress. A few weeks later, Turkish
prosecutors issued a lengthy court indictment charging the Syrian rebels
with seeking to use chemical weapons. The indictment suggested that
sarin gas and other "weapons for a terrorist organization" were utilized
by the opposition and not by the Assad government. The "Syrian
freedom fighters" include men who are not even Syrian, much like the
many mujahedeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan but who were not
Afghani. As reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 19, 2013),
the ISIS, an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit operating in Syria, "has become a
magnet for foreign jihadists" who view the war in Syria not primarily as
a means to overthrow Assad "but rather as a historic battleground for a
larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic prophecy
they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step to
achieving a global one."

Wrong Hands Meanwhile, a Mint
Press News story quoted residents in Ghouta who asserted that Saudi
Arabia gave chemical weapons to an al Qaeda-linked group. Residents
blamed this terrorist group for the deadly explosions of August 21. They
claimed that some of the rebels handled the weapons improperly and
thereby set off the explosions. Anti-government forces, interviewed in
the article, said they had not been informed about the nature of the
weapons nor how to use them. “When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such
weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle
them,” complained one rebel militant.

At the same time, the
Russian government submitted a 100-page report to the United Nations in
early September, regarding an attack upon the Syrian city of Aleppo in
March 2013. It concludes that the rebels---not the Syrian
government---used the nerve agent sarin. According to a member of the
U.N. independent commission of inquiry, Carla Del Ponte, there were
"strong, concrete suspicions . . . of the use of sarin gas." Del Ponte
added: "This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not the
government authorities." Many of those killed by the gas attack were
Syrian soldiers, according to the report.

If true, then we
might wonder why are chemical weapons and other weaponry and supplies
being supplied to various al Qaeda-type groups? Is not al Qaeda a secret
terrorist organization that delivers death and destruction upon people
everywhere? Are we Americans not locked in a global struggle with the
demonic jihadists who supposedly hate us because we are rich,
successful, and secular, while they are impoverished failures? That
certainly is the scenario the U.S. public has been fed for over a
decade.

The United States claims it provides military
assistance only to "vetted" rebel groups, "free ones" that are friendly
toward America and are not Islamic fanatics. (Although, as Senator
Croker, Republican from Tennessee, admitted: we sometimes make
"mistakes" and give weapons to the wrong rebels.) On September 17,
President Obama waived a provision in the federal law that prohibits
supplying arms to terrorist groups. To many of us this was an unspoken
admission that Washington was giving aid to extremist Islamic groups, of
which al Qaeda was only the best advertised.

Remember the Casus Belli
It is difficult for me to accept the charge that on August 21 the
Syrian government waged a chemical onslaught in Ghouta against its own
people in a situation that was bound to backfire in the worst possible
way---by handing over to the U.S. war hawks a casus belli, a perfect
excuse to wreak retaliatory "humanitarian" death and destruction upon
Syria. This is the last thing the Assad government wants.

Remember how the Spaniards asked the Americans not to send the USS Maine
to Havana Harbor in 1898. They feared that something might happen to
the ship and the U.S. would use that mishap as a casus belli, putting
the blame on Spain. Sure enough, the Maine blew up while sitting in the
harbor, sending U.S. public opinion into a jingoistic fury against the
Spaniards. But why would Spaniards perpetrate the very act that would
give the Americans an excuse and an inducement to wage a war that Spain
most certainly did not want and could not win?

And let us not
forget the hundreds of imaginary Kuwaiti babies torn from incubators and
dashed upon hospital floors by snarling, maniacal Iraqi soldiers. And
remember the never-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that
Saddam supposedly was preparing to use but never got around to doing so.
And then there's that Serbian general---never identified or
located---who purportedly told his troops (also never identified) to "go
forth and rape." And Qaddafi who reportedly handed out Viagra to his
Libyan troops so they could go forth and rape with a drug-driven vigor, a
story so obviously fabricated that it was dropped after two days.

Choice: Satellite or Enemy
Why do (some) U.S. leaders seek war against Syria? Like Yugoslavia,
Iraq, Libya and dozens of other countries that have felt America's
terrible swift sword---Syria has been committing economic nationalism,
trying to chart its own course rather than putting itself in service to
the western plutocracy. Like Iran, China, Russia and some other nations,
Syria has currency controls and other restrictions on foreign
investments. Like those other nations, Syria lacks the proper
submissiveness. It is not a satellite to the U.S. imperium. And any
nation that is not under the politico-economic sway of the U.S. global
plutocracy is considered an enemy or a potential enemy.

The
Assad government had social programs for its people, far from perfect
services but still better than what might be found in many U.S.
satellite countries. When Iraqi refugees fled to Syria to escape U.S.
military destruction, the Assad government gave them full benefits. So
with the Libyan refugees who crossed over a few years later. Generally
Damascus presided over a multi-ethnic society, relatively free of
sectarian intolerance and violence.

Syria has been ruled by the
Ba'ath Party which has dominated the country's parliament and military
for half a century. The party's slogan is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism."
Socialism? Now that gets us closer to why the trigger-happy boys in
Washington will continue to pursue a "humanitarian war" of attrition and
a prolonged campaign of demonization against Assad and his "regime."

Weapons of Mass Destruction Redux
On September 10, the Syrian government welcomed a Russian proposal
calling for Syria to place all of its chemical weapons under
international control and for the weapons to be destroyed. Here was a
chance to avoid false charges of mass murder by sarin. If Assad no
longer had such an arsenal, no one could accuse him of using it. (In any
case, the Syrian government's campaign against the rebels was going
well enough using just conventional weapons.)

Instead of
winning approval from the humanitarian warriors of the West, Syria's
eager agreement to surrender its chemical arsenal set off a newly framed
barrage of threats from U.S. and French leaders, with the irrepressible
Secretary Kerry leading the charge. Was this a ploy on Syria's part or a
genuine offer? Kerry asked in a scoffing tone. How can we be certain
that Assad would not sequester its enormous stock of chemical weapons?
Kerry issued a whole barrage of tough-guy threats. Syria will be treated
most harshly if it pursued a path of deception. French President
François Hollande called for a United Nations Security resolution that
would authorize the use of force if Syria failed to hand over its
chemical weapons. One would think that Syria had refused to do so.

The August charge had been that Syria had used chemical weapons , a
claim that might be refuted. Now the new charge was that Syria possessed
such weapons---which was true. And possession itself was suddenly being
treated as a crime deserving of swift and severe retaliation.

Now Assad would have to demonstrate the indemonstrable. He would have
to convince the western aggressors that he has handed over his entire
stockpile of chemical weapons. At the same time, he asserts that a
thorough inspection must not come at the expense of disclosing Syrian
military sites or causing a threat to its national security.

Recall how the Saddam government in Iraq, hoping to avoid war,
cooperated fully with U.N. inspectors hunting for WMDs. Every facility
in the country was opened to investigation. Even after all of Iraq was
occupied, the hunt continued. We were told that the WMDs could be
anywhere, maybe out in some remote part of the desert. It was impossible
to be sure.

I fear that the Syrian population is facing more
years of painful attrition. The one faintly positive development is that
the FSA and the ISIS and all the murderous, Allah-is-great grouplets
continue to attack not only the government forces but each other. Dozens
of rebels have been killed in clashes with each other within the last
few months.

Meanwhile young Syrian children, now living in
refugee camps in Lebanon, go every morning to work long days in the
fields, earning the few dollars a day upon which their families depend
for survival. Some are as young as 5. When asked what they miss most
about Syria, the children say, "school." _________ Michael
Parenti is the author of "The Face of Imperialism" and "Waiting for
Yesterday:Pages from a Street Kid's Life." See his website for more
information: www.michaelparenti.org

Sunday, 1 September 2013

The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington---in which Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. made his famed "I Have a Dream" speech---has recently
won renewed attention from various print and electronic media in the
United States. But the more attention given to King's extraordinary
speech, the less we seem to know about King himself, the less aware we
are about the serious challenges he was presenting, challenges that
remain urgent and ignored to this very day.

The March on
Washington took place on 28 August 1963. Despite repeated fear mongering
by certain commentators and public officials who predicted there would
be violence in the streets---over 250,000 people descended upon
Washington D.C. in a massive show of unity and peaceful determination.

I was there. About two-thirds of the demonstrators were
African-American, and about one-third were white. After all these years I
still recall how gripped I was by the vast sweep of the crowd moving
like democracy's infantry across the nation's capital, determined to
awaken "our leaders" in Congress and the White House.

The
high moment of the day was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
It was a call to freedom and enfranchisement for a people who had
endured centuries of slavery followed by segregation and lynch-mob rule.
In his speech King reminded us that "the Negro is still languishing in
the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own
land."

He went on: "The marvelous new militancy which has
engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white
people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence
here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our
destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom."

King continued to stoke the new militancy: "We can never be satisfied
as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York
believes he has nothing for which to vote. . . . Now is the time to
rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path
of racial justice."

Then came his smashing conclusion: "When
we allow freedom to ring from every village and every hamlet, from every
state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of
God's children," all colors and creeds "will be able to join hands and
sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at
last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

At this, the
crowd exploded with thunderous applause and wild cheers. Many of us were
left overwhelmed and misty eyed. For all its clichés and overdone
metaphors, King's "I Have a Dream" speech remains a truly great oration.

So impressive is the speech, however, that commentators and pundits to
this day have found it easy to focus safely upon it to the neglect of
other vital social issues that engaged King.

The
opinion-makers prefer to treat Martin Luther King as an inspirational
icon rather than a radical leader. He has been domesticated and
sanitized. Today the real King probably would not be invited to the
White House because he is too far left, too much the agitator.

In 1967, he was becoming an increasingly serious problem for the
defenders of privilege and profit. King came out against the Vietnam War
that year, a fact that is seldom mentioned today. His stance
discomforted many liberals (black and white) who felt they should
concentrate on civil rights and not alienate potential supporters with
anti-war issues. But for King, the U.S. government had become "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world," spending far more on death
and destruction than on vital social programs.

He differed
with those who believed we could resist violence and cruelty at home
while resorting to violence and cruelty abroad. He condemned "those who
make peaceful revolution impossible," those who "refuse to give up the
privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits from
overseas investments . . . the individual capitalists who extract
wealth" at the expense of other peoples and places.

By 1967
King was treading on dangerous ground. He was connecting the issues. He
condemned "the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and
militarism." The same interests that brought us slums also brought us
wars, he argued, and they were getting richer for the doing. By
1968, the year he was assassinated, King was also waging war against
poverty. Civil rights, he dared to say, were linked to economic rights.
He was planning a national occupation of Washington D.C., called the
Poor People's Campaign. Again he was treading on dangerous ground
bringing together working-class people of various ethnic groups.

These class demands go unmentioned in the usual MLK commemorations. The
"I Have a Dream" oration now overshadows the other less known messages
that King was putting forth not long before he was killed, including the
search for economic justice for all working people. The great "dream
speech" of 1963 serves less as an inspiration and more as a cloak
covering his latter-day radical views regarding class struggle and
anti-imperialism.

In 1968, at the age of 39, Martin Luther King
was killed by a sniper's bullet while standing on the balcony of his
motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. He was in Memphis to lend support to a
sanitation workers strike, the very kind of thing his opponents were
finding increasingly intolerable.

A penniless fugitive from the
Missouri State Penitentiary, James Earl Ray, while being sought by the
police, supposedly took it upon himself singlehandedly to make his way
to Memphis where he somehow located King's motel balcony and shot him
from a room across the courtyard. Then entirely on his own,
supposedly with no visible financial support, the fugitive convict and
newly established assassin made his way to England. Arrested in London
at Heathrow Airport with substantial sums of cash in his pocket, Ray was
extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. He was
strongly advised by his lawyer to enter a guilty plea (to avoid the
death penalty) and was sentenced to 99 years. Three days later he
recanted his confession. Over the ensuing decades he made repeatedly
unsuccessful efforts to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried by a jury.
Ray died in prison in 1998, still proclaiming his innocence.

In 1986 King's birthday was established as a national holiday. Hundreds
of streets in America have been renamed in his honor. There are annual
commemorations. His resonant voice, memorable words and gripping cadence
are played and replayed. But the politco-economic issues he highlighted
continue to be passed over by mainstream leaders and commentators.

In addition, the opinion-makers who celebrate King's birthday every
year and hail him as a monumental figure have nothing to say about the
many unresolved questions related to his assassination. No one openly
entertains the question of whether there were powerful people
(certainly more powerful than James Earl Ray) who thought it necessary
to do away with this popular leader because he had moved too far beyond
"I Have a Dream." _______ Michael Parenti is an award winning,
internationally known author. His two most recent books are The Face of
Imperialism (2011), and Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street
Kid's Life (2013), a memoir of his early life.

Friday, 26 April 2013

On April 8, 2013, the western world lost a grand dame, an
iconic figure, a woman admired by millions while dismissed by others as just
another lady in a bouffant hairdo. She came from a modest social background yet
she made her way to the top, a woman who could perform winningly in what is
arguably the most competitive arena of life. I am, of course, speaking of
Annette Funicello, singer and Hollywood actress.

Oh wait, some readers may have assumed I was pumping for Margaret
Thatcher, former prime minister of Great Britain, who also died on April 8,
2013. No, Thatcher and Funicello had nothing in common, save for the bouffant
hairdo and date of death.

Annette Funicello was a child star in the late 1950s, one of
the Mouseketeers, complete with enormous
Mickey Mouse ears, appearing on Walt Disney's "Mickey Mouse Club." As
a teenager, she turned out hit tunes and captivated adolescent hearts in Beach
Blanket movies.

How many hearts did Thatcher captivate in her teenage years?
Did she even have teenage years? Or did she not vault directly from early
childhood into late adulthood? In any case, she was no day at the beach.

The most memorable moment Thatcher ever provided for me was
her adulatory spiel to the blood-drenched Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet,
as the two of them sat in a cozy room in Britain. Pinochet was resisting
deportation to Spain to stand trial as a war criminal. He was rescued from
justice by Prime Minister Tony Blair who regularly sucked up to reactionary war
mongers especially those "friendly to the West."

Without stint Thatcher poured out her gratitude and admiration
to a smiling Pinochet for "saving Chile from the communists," and
restoring peace, liberty, and stability. She made no mention of the many
thousands of Chileans whom Pinochet imprisoned, tortured, executed, or drove
into exile. On that visit to Pinochet, Thatcher was wearing her fascism right
under her makeup.

Would
Annette Funicello ever kiss a dictator's butt the way Thatcher did? I think not. During her stardom, Annette
described herself as “the queen of teen,” and millions of fans close to her age
agreed. As one critic put it, "Young audiences appreciated her sweet,
forthright appeal, and parents saw her as the perfect daughter." Here was the girl you might take home to meet
and marry your son. Would you say the same about Lady Thatcher? Only if you
really hated your kid.

Thatcher
served for eleven years as Prime Minister, waging war upon the Irish, the Argentines,
and the social democracy that existed in Britain. Be it health care, education,
mining, transportation, housing, utilities or other public industries---many were
privatized, deregulated, or cutback while customer rates and costs sharply
increased. Corporate salaries rose to obscene heights while wages remained flat
or declined. Labor unions were broken. Under Thatcher's reign, the free market was
king, producing ever greater profits and lower taxes for the superrich and ever
greater hardship for the populace. A poll tax was imposed upon the people, an
equal sum to be paid by both the dustman and the duke.

Someone once said that Margaret Thatcher satisfied the
average Englishman's longing for the perfect dominatrix. No doubt about it, she
could deliver pain. The Iron Lady should best be remembered as the Leather
Lady. Indeed, today Thatcherism leaves its dreary imprint not only on the
Conservative Party but---thanks also to Tony Blair---on a Labor Party that
accepts most of her regressive policies.

During her reign, Thatcher also pursued her "school-girl
political crush for President Reagan" as one Labor MP pronounced during a
parliamentary debate. Indeed, she and Reagan adored each other, politically
speaking. With hands joined, as it were, they created in their respective
countries more wealth for the few and more poverty for the many. They served as
a free-market inspiration to one another as they advanced back into the dark
ages.

President Barack Obama, who loves to grovel before rightwing
leaders (note his adoring depiction of Reagan as a "transformative"
president), issued a cloying statement following Thatcher's death:"With the passing of Baroness Margaret
Thatcher, the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty,
and America has lost a true friend. . . . Here in America, many of us will
never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding
the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we
can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will." Obama
invites nausea.

If
only for a brief moment, let us get back to our girl Annette Funicello, the
only laudable personage in this sorry parade. While Thatcher was cutting health
services, Annette was championing the campaign against multiple sclerosis, a
disease she herself grappled with for more than 25 years, until death took her at
age 70.

Speaking of disease: long after they left office, both
Reagan and Thatcher were inundated with honors; their material lives groaned
with abundance. But their respective mental
lives ended in dismal poverty, that is, in dementia. Their brains had turned
to porridge.

There must be many
reasons why people suffer dementia. But in regard to Reagan and Thatcher, I
suspect it was a self-generated condition. When one tirelessly confects so many
fictional representations and twisty untruths---allin the cause of callous plunder and greater social
inequality---it must put an inordinate strain on one's brain.

Meanwhile the anti-Thatcher theme song, "Ding Dong the
Witch is Dead" now enjoys a massive
revival in Britain and retains a top slot on the charts. The people are dancing
in the streets.

All I can say is "May she rest in peace." (I'm
talking about Annette.)

__________

Michael Parenti's most recent book is The Face of Imperialism. Soon to be published is his childhood
memoir Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from
a Street Kid's Life.

Thursday, 28 February 2013

In 1951, only five years after World War II ended, I managed
to make my way to Paris where I landed a job as a courier diplomatique (messenger boy) for the United Nations Sixth
General Assembly. Despite the years of war and deprivation, Paris still was a
special place with its history, its cafes, galleries, bridges, ornate edifices,
and narrow winding cobblestone streets, some seemingly as old as the city
itself.

Recent reports about how horsemeat has been smuggled into
certain meat products in England, Sweden, and elsewhere remind me of one of
Paris's unusual features of 1951: the numerous butcher shops that sold
horsemeat. Such a shop usually sported a mounted life-sized horse head (made of
metal or wood) above the store entrance to advertise unequivocally that the butcher
specialized in the sale of horse flesh.

I ate horsemeat at a small neighborhood Parisian restaurant
a number of times. It was smoothly textured and more gamy than beef. I wasn't
particularly fond of it but it did have the virtue of being affordable. In
those post-war days, low-income Parisians were more inclined to eat horses than
ride them.

All the talk today about how undesirable it is to consume
horses carries the implication that our immense ingestion of other livestock is
perfectly acceptable. We are advised not to eat horses, nor dogs, rabbits, or
cats---no matter how close to starvation we might be. But devouring limitless numbers
of cattle, pigs, sheep, lambs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks is quite all right.

This causes us to overlook the real problem, which is not
horsemeat but meat consumption in general. The world cannot feed itself if it
continues to make meat a common staple. Millions upon millions of livestock require
vast amounts of grain and water, ultimately far more than the environment will
be able to provide.

Aside from the survival problems raised by the consumption
of immense quantities of land, water, and grain in producing meat, there is another
menacing aspect: all the poisons and torture that happen along the way from the
feedlot to the supermarket. For the health of the planet and for our own health
and for the sake of the livestock, we should stop eating animals. Rather than calling
for more regulation of meat production, we need to move entirely away from meat
meals.

Originating from the
top of the food chain, all animal products menace our health. Pesticides and
other toxic run-offs work their way into the food and water consumed by livestock.
So with wild and farmed fish, and seafood. Finally, perched at the highest rung
of the food chain, we humans feast on the accumulated toxins that concentrate
further in our bodies.

Many of us are unsettled about eating horses, dogs, cats, rabbits,
snakes, monkeys, rodents, or alligators---which other people around the world
do eat. Perhaps we should give more attention to the horrid mistreatment of
domesticated livestock,the mass
produced cruelties of factory farms, the torturous stalls, the joyless
overcrowded feedlots, the loads of antibiotic and hormone additives, the frequent
sickness and fatal dismemberments, and the terrible toxic accumulations.

Save your health and your planet. May all animal consumption
go the way of the Paris horsemeat butcher shops.

-----------------------------

Michael Parenti's recent books include The Face of Imperialism and the forthcoming Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid's Life (a memoir of
his early life).

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Through much of history the
abnormal has been the norm. This is a paradox to which we should attend.
Aberrations, so plentiful as to form a terrible normality of their own, descend
upon us with frightful consistency.

The number of massacres in
history, for instance, are almost more than we can record. There was the New World holocaust, consisting
of the extermination of indigenous Native American peoples throughout the
western hemisphere, extending over four centuries or more, continuing into recent
times in the Amazon region.

There were the centuries of heartless
slavery in the Americas and elsewhere, followed by a full century of lynch mob
rule and Jim Crow segregation in the United States, and today the numerous
killings and incarcerations of Black youth by law enforcement agencies.

Let us not forget the
extermination of some 200,000 Filipinos by the U.S. military at the beginning
of the twentieth century, the genocidal massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by
the Turks in 1915, and the mass killings of African peoples by the western
colonists, including the 63,000 Herero victims in German Southwest Africa in 1904,
and the brutalization and enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo from the
late 1880s until emancipation in 1960---followed by years of neocolonial
free-market exploitation and repression in what was Mobutu's Zaire.

French colonizers killed some
150,000 Algerians. Later on, several million souls perished in Angola and
Mozambique along with an estimated five million in the merciless region now
known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The twentieth century gave us---among
other horrors---more than sixteen million lost and twenty million wounded or
mutilated in World War I, followed by the estimated 62 million to 78 million killed
in World War II, including some 24 million Soviet military personnel and
civilians, 5.8 million European Jews, and taken together: several million Serbs, Poles, Roma,
homosexuals, and a score of other nationalities.

In the decades after World War II,
many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or covertly sponsored by
the U.S. national security state. This includes the two million or so left dead
or missing in Vietnam, along with 650,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000
Americans.

Today in much of Africa,
Central Asia, and the Middle East there are "smaller" wars, replete
with atrocities of all sorts. Central America, Colombia, Rwanda and other
places too numerous to list, suffered the massacres and death-squad
exterminations of hundreds of thousands, a constancy of violent horrors. In
Mexico a "war on drugs" has taken 70,000 lives with 8,000 missing.

There was the slaughter of more
than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist Indonesians by the
U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965, eventually followed by the extermination
of 100,000 East Timorese by that same U.S.-backed military.

Consider the 78-days of NATO's aerial
destruction of Yugoslavia complete with depleted uranium, and the bombings and
invasion of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Western Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and now the devastating war of attrition brokered against Syria.
And as I write (early 2013), the U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iran are seeding
severe hardship for the civilian population of that country.

All the above amounts to a very
incomplete listing of the world's violent and ugly injustice. A comprehensive
inventory would fill volumes.How do
we record thecountless other life-searing
abuses: the many millions who survive wars and massacres but remain forever broken
in body and spirit, left to a lifetime of suffering and pitiless privation, refugees
without sufficient food or medical supplies or water and sanitation services in
countries like Syria, Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Mali.

Think of the millions of women
and children around the world and across the centuries who have beentrafficked in unspeakable ways, and the millions upon
millions trapped in exploitative toil, be they slaves, indentured servants, or underpaid
laborers. The number of impoverished is now growing at a faster rate than the
world's population.Add to that, the
countless acts of repression, incarceration, torture, and other criminal abuses
that beat upon the human spirit throughout the world day by day.

Let us not overlook the ubiquitous
corporate corruption and massive financial swindles, the plundering of natural
resources and industrial poisoning of whole regions, the forceful dislocation
of entire populations, the continuing catastrophes of Chernobyl and Fukushima
and other impending disasters awaiting numerous aging nuclear reactors.

The world's dreadful aberrations
are so commonplace and unrelenting that they lose their edge and we become
inured to the horror of it all. "Who today remembers the Armenians?"
Hitler is quoted as having said while plotting his "final solution"
for the Jews. Who today remembers the Iraqis and the death and destruction done
to them on a grand scale by the U.S. invasion of their lands? William Blum
reminds us that more than half the Iraq population is either dead, wounded,
traumatized, imprisoned, displaced, or exiled, while their environment is
saturated with depleted uranium (from U.S. weaponry) inflicting horrificbirth defects.

What is to be made of all this?
First, we must not ascribe these aberrations to happenstance, innocent
confusion, and unintended consequences. Nor should we believe the usual
rationales about spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, providing humanitarian
rescue, protecting U.S. national interests and other such rallying cries
promulgated by ruling elites and their mouthpieces.

The repetitious patterns of
atrocity and violence are so persistent as to invite the suspicion that they usually
serve real interests; they are structural not incidental.All this destruction and slaughter has
greatly profited those plutocrats who pursue economic expansion, resource
acquisition, territorial dominion, and financial accumulation.

Ruling interestsare well served by their superiority in firepower and
striking force. Violence is what we are talking about here, not just the wild
and wanton type but the persistent and well-organized kind. As a political
resource, violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for
the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain, while keeping
displaced laborers and other slaves in harness.

The plutocratic rulers find it
necessary to misuse or exterminate restive multitudes, to let them starve while
the fruits of their land and the sweat of their labor enrich privileged
coteries.

Thus we had a profit-driven imperial
rule that helped precipitate the great famine in northern China, 1876-1879,
resulting in the death of some thirteen million. At about that same time the
Madras famine in India took the lives of as many as twelve million while the
colonial forces grew ever richer. And
thirty years earlier, the great potato famine in Ireland led to about one
million deaths, with another desperate million emigrating from their homeland. Nothing
accidental about this: while the Irish starved, their English landlords
exported shiploads of Irish grain and livestock to England and elsewhere at considerable
profit to themselves.

These occurrences must be seen
as something more than just historic abnormalities floating aimlessly in time
and space, driven only by overweening impulse or happenstance. It is not enough
to condemn monstrous events and bad times, we also must try to understand them.
They must be contextualized in the larger framework of historical social relations.

The dominant socio-economic system
today is free-market capitalism (in all its variations). Along with its unrelenting
imperial terrorism, free-market capitalism provides "normal abnormalities"
from within its own dynamic, creating scarcity and maldistributed excess, filled
with duplication, waste, overproduction, frightening environmental destruction,
and varieties of financial crises, bringing swollen rewards to a select few and
continual hardship to multitudes.

Economic crises are not
exceptional; they are the standing operational mode of the capitalist system. Once
again, the irrational is the norm. Consider U.S. free-market history: after the
American Revolution, there were the debtor rebellions of the late 1780s, the
panic of 1792, the recession of 1809 (lasting several years), the panics of
1819 and 1837, and recessions and crashes through much of the rest of that
century. The serious recession of 1893 continued for more than a decade.

After the industrial underemployment
of 1900 to 1915 came the agrarian depression of the 1920s---hidden behind what became
known to us as "the Jazz Age," followed by a horrendous crash and the
Great Depression of 1929-1942. All through the twentieth century we had wars,
recessions, inflation, labor struggles, high unemployment---hardly a year that
would be considered "normal" in any pleasant sense. An extended
normal period would itself have been an abnormality. The free market is by
design inherently unstable in every aspect other than wealth accumulation for
the select few.

What we are witnessing is not
an irrational output from a basically rational society but the converse: the "rational"
(to be expected) output of a fundamentally irrational system. Does this mean
these horrors are inescapable?No, they are not made of supernatural forces. They
are produced by plutocratic greed and deception.

So, if the aberrant is the norm
and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give less
attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars, massacres and recessions
help to increase capital concentration, monopolize markets and natural
resources, and destroy labor organizations and popular transformative resistance.

The brutish vagaries of plutocracy
are not the product of particular personalities but of systemic interests. President
George W. Bush was ridiculed for misusing words, but his empire-building and
stripping of government services and regulations revealed a keen devotion to ruling-class
interests. Likewise, President Barack Obama
is not spineless. He is hypocritical but not confused. He is (by his own
description) an erstwhile "liberal Republican," or as I would put it,
a faithful servant of corporate America.

Our various leaders are well
informed, not deluded. They come from different regions and different families,
and have different personalities, yet they pursue pretty much the same policies
on behalf of the same plutocracy.

So it is not enough to denounce
atrocities and wars, we also must understand who propagates them and who benefits.
We have to ask why violence and deception are constant ingredients.

Unintended consequences and
other oddities do arise in worldly affairs but we also must take account of interest-driven
rational intentions. More often than not, the aberrations---be they wars, market
crashes, famines, individual assassinations or mass killings---take shape because
those at the top are pursuing gainful expropriation. Many may suffer and perish
but somebodysomewhereis
benefiting boundlessly.

Knowing your enemies and what
they are capable of doing is the first step toward effective opposition. The
world becomes less of a horrific puzzlement.We can only resist these global (and local) perpetrators when we see who
they are and what they are doing to us and our sacred environment.

Democratic victories, however
small and partial they be, must be embraced. But the people must not be
satisfied with tinseled favors offered by smooth leaders. We need to strive in everyway possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a
revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire's heart with the
full force of democracy, the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come
from nowhere while carrying everything before it.

____________________

Michael Parenti is the author
of The Face of Imperialism and
numerous other books. For further
information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.